Tag: trump

This is a longer one. Basically, I’m saying that I expected Trump to become president. I’m not happy about it, and I think I know how it happened. I have a few ideas on things we can focus on and maybe make the election process a little better the next time around.

What I originally wanted to do here was just write a big old “I told you so” in big old capital letters. Over and over and over again. I wanted to do that so badly, because it is unbelievably frustrating being someone who tried to speak up about the risk of running Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. I was denigrated and harangued because of that, and I’m kind of not over it yet. But blowing a big raspberry at the general public is immature and unhelpful. It’s time to move on (see Michael Moore for his opinion on this matter). This will take longer to read than a big raspberry, but it’s time to look at the wreckage, salvage what we can, and move forward. That’s my perspective, and that’s my advice.

So what can we salvage? Well, if anyone was confused about or unwilling to believe how divided and angry our country is, that should be all cleared up now. Donald Trump won. If that’s not evidence of anger and division, I don’t know what is. Also, a bunch of people voted third party and exercised their option to write-in a candidate of their choosing. Don’t be angry at them, because they voted their conscience. We can work with them. Third, according to a variety of sources, voter turnout was lower this year than in both 2008 and 2012, though it seems to have hovered around the usual percentage of recent history at about 43% of the eligible voting age population. We knew early on that we need a high turnout for the success of progressive and Democrat ideas, and it didn’t happen. Lastly, the mainstream media — well, media in general — is not giving us the whole story and in fact may not know it. They were caught just as unaware by Trump’s election as the Democrats were. With an attempt and non-denigration and blame, I want to spend a little time talking about these and looking at what we can do in the future.

Anger & fear

Like we’ve been trying to do with institutional racism, it’s time to acknowledge the economic and gender disparities in the United States. A certain population of white males are feeling threatened (see the rise of Alt-Right groups meeting in the open, for example) by the idea that black’s and women’s lives matter. Women still get less pay than men. People living in poverty and out of work feel left behind by the “good news” conversations about our economy, and the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement have not ever been fully addressed. Multiple deaths at the hands of police, rise in paranoia among NRA supporters, and a fervent adherence to guns. All of these things have contributed in their own way to a pervasive and infections sense of anger that drives fear that feeds more anger. Trump tapped into this and used it as a lever to get elected. We can no longer deny these feelings in our country, nor should we.

Instead, we need to spend time as a nation understanding the sources of this fear and anger. Give honor to people’s feelings by recognizing them as real. We may not agree with the reasons for the feelings, but we cannot deny that they are being felt. Problems have never been solved by hiding them, nor have feelings ever been overcome by burying them. If we want to avoid more emotionally-triggered elections like this one, we need to understand where the triggers are and how to address them. For example, I may not agree with the Alt-Right, or be able to fully empathize with the Black Lives Matter movement, but I can work to understand the sources of their fear and anger (respectively) and see what I can do about addressing them. We may not find the right solution, but we can’t just ignore the problems.

Vote your voice & Voter turnout

This issue combines the rights of voters to vote their way without interference with the likelihood of voters to do that. I’ve been studying voter turnout trends for a few years, and since about 1964, we’ve elected a president and members of congress with around 40% of registered voters, or about 30% of the eligible voting population (some people don’t ever register to vote). What this means in shorthand, is that about 16% of the eligible voting population chose Trump. It looks like a large number when we look at the popular vote number, but the United States is a country with just over 330 million people. Trump and the Republicans will call this a mandate, but the reality is that it’s not more of a mandate than any other election. What his success truly represents is a very vocal minority brought him to power.

In truth, it is always a very vocal minority who participates in elections. Mostly because of lack of interest or lack of choices. This year was no different. About six to seven percent of the voters exercised their rights to vote for a candidate other than Clinton or Trump (full disclosure: I wrote in Bernie Sanders). You may not like it, but it’s completely understandable. Both candidates were more disliked than any other candidate in the history of the United States. The most liked candidate (Sanders) was left behind by the Democrats (or so it feels). People are frustrated (see “Anger & Fear” above) with the status quo, with what they feel is a rigged system, and the success of Trump along with the “inevitability” of Clinton led these voters to express themselves by choosing others as their candidates. We can’t avoid this happening if we truly want to live in a democratic society and the people who chose to do this are right to make that choice.

Neither of these issues can be solved through anger towards voters. The system we have in place that includes private organizations creating rules for who can be a candidate (political parties), the amount of money required to run for office, the reduction of polling places in certain areas, gerrymandering, the unraveling of the Voting Rights Act, the distribution of population, the size of our country, and the general feelings of the electorate all fed into turnout numbers and people’s decisions at the polls. We don’t correct those by blaming people. We correct those by looking at the triggers of human behavior and seeing if we can fix them. We can make it easier to vote. We can create public funds for campaigns. We can increase the number of political parties and change the rules for being included in debates. In short, if we want to experience an election where there are higher turnouts of people who are excited to vote, we need to make sure they are voting for things that make sense to them and can do it as easily as possible.

The media

It’s a standard truth of civics that a democracy (i.e., a society where government is chosen through a voting populace) requires an informed electorate. It is to this task that journalism — a portion of “the media” — is supposed to be bent. Journalism at its root should be informing the public about the activities of government, the goings-on of police, the happenings in their community. It should supply educated and opinion and perspective on those events, as well. Because of the importance of it, Thomas Jefferson once called newspaper “the fourth estate” of society, meaning that it should serve as a watchdog of the government, the merchants, and the people themselves. It is because of this importance that the First Amendment exists. Journalists must be allowed to speak freely in order to provide the fullest possible picture to their public. We all know, however, that this has not been true for some years.

News is big business and is handled by a handful of corporations who in some cases also own the means of distribution (Comcast, AT&T, ClearChannel). This narrowed ownership of distribution by big business creates a system that is about profit more more than it ever has been. While profit has always been required to ensure the existence of news, it’s a relatively recent endeavor to use the news to drive profit up (maybe in the last 75 years or so). The upshot of this is that the news covers only those things that a) ensure viewership/readership, b) do not anger corporate partners, and c) do not run afoul of advertising interests/investment partners.

Given these constraints, it is inevitable that journalism will begin to soften its reporting of controversial issues and increase coverage of things that “sell” their content. It’s generally known that people don’t like to be forced into thinking as much as they like seeing explosions, bad guys getting arrested, gossipy opinions, and the like. This kind of action moves the news industry away from the watchdog role envisioned by Jefferson, to a kind of entertainment that actually serves to dull the capacity of the electorate to understand what their government is doing and why.

So what can we do? Well, we could stop watching/reading/listening to the corporate owned news, for one. There are alternative options that did a pretty good job of reporting on controversy over the last two years or so. We can also avoid getting news from forums like DailyKOS, Reddit, or Facebook unless we understand the difference between fact and opinion (i.e. those sites provide user-generated content about events, so are always spun from a personal point of view). Also, we can report on news on our own through YouTube, Vimeo, TwitchTV, Periscope, WordPress, and other streaming and viewing sources. There are lots of resources online on how to do journalism (here’s a start), and there are groups available that provide the kind of legal protection afforded journalists. I’m a member of Investigative Reports and Editors (IRE) and their resources are pretty good. Just remember that journalism is not gossip, libel, or innuendo. It requires multiple points of view and research.

Wrap-up

In short, then, Trump’s election should not be a surprise to anyone. We are a country of anger and fear manipulated by stories told to us by a profit-driven media so that we either vote the way we’re “supposed to” or don’t vote at all. In this system, there is no room to blame the people or ourselves. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own actions, of course, but it is the system that generates the problems, and the problems will only go away if we change the system. Once we do that, once we can see the system for what it is, we can start to be more informed about the decisions we make.

Some final advice taken from, like, a ton of stuff I’ve written over the years:

Focus locally. Hold your local politicians accountable for everything they do and say. If they falter, tell them. If they falter too much, vote them out.

Think critically about what you read and what you are told. If it doesn’t make sense, or if you just want a second opinion, look somewhere else for the same story. Ask family or friends what they think.

Never vote how you’re told. Vote the way you feel is best.

Most importantly, never let anger or fear drive your decisions. Feeling anger and being afraid are normal emotions, but they also make it difficult for us to think and change our perspective on the world. Do fear or anger drive your decisions? If so, try to ask yourself why and take a pause

That’s it for now. Let’s see what we can salvage and where we can go from here. Don’t lose heart.